# Why didn't China adopt an alphabet? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 12, 2012, 1:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272 "2012-01-12T13:14:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/21 "2012-01-12T17:34:35Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > So was written Chinese only used by the civil service and the intellectual elite (much like written latin in medieval Europe)? Or did the easy recognition of common pictograms mean that even illiterates could recognize the basics - “Beer here” or “beware of snapping 烏龜” ? Basically, yeah. The poor could not read. The communist party raised the literacy rate of the public by quite a bit, actually. There is this really neat photo-book by a Chinese artist. He filled it with pictures of his Mom and Dad, two rather poor people who were amazingly loving, but totally uneducated. He shows his Mom standing by a sign with the only Chinese character she knew(I think it was “go” or “stop” or something). Touching book, too. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/22 "2012-01-12T17:53:20Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > OTOH, it seems the Japanese writing options seem to point to a civilaization that was slowly finding the syllabic writing system more efficient than the heroglyphic. Japan is still finding its balance, back maybe 60-70 years ago almost everything was the good ol’ semantic phonetic Chinese characters, even (some) particles. Then after the reform there were very few Kanji until they started building them up again. Nowadays there’s a split between words that you always use Kanji, words where you use Kanji if you feel like it (it’s perfectly acceptable to write “under” as した or 下, and in fact my typing mechanism defaults to the former and requires explicit instruction to write the Kanji), and words that have been bastardized to katakana because it’s kewl and edgy d00d. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/23 "2012-01-12T18:00:21Z")
One point is that all the Chinese languages (and it is a mistake to call them dialects although they are related, perhaps like all the Romance languages) are written the same. I personally knew a couple of students who could not talk to each other but could write notes. A more interesting question is why Japanese has not adopted an alphabetic script. They have one that is used for adding declensions (which Chinese languages lack) and a second one for foreign words and they could readily adopt it for everything. They are actually syllabaries, but close enough. And there is no spread of dialects that makes the Chinese system worth something. ---
**Author:** ![Throatwarbler\_Mangrove](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8c91f0/32.png) [@Throatwarbler\_Mangrove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Throatwarbler_Mangrove)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/24 "2012-01-12T18:15:30Z")
> [@](#): > > Well, Mandarin and Cantonese do write the same. Then again, many mainland Chinese people use simplified Chinese, which differs from traditional Chinese(which is, indeed, way more complicated). > > I believe that the adoption of Pinyin as the official written language was discussed in the 1970’s by China’s government. Ultimately, it went nowhere. > > Honestly, everyone is just really used to Chinese and they appreciate the beauty of the language too much to move entirely over to an alphabet based written language. As hard as it may seem to us, educated Chinese folks do manage to master the language and they are the ones making the decisions. > [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > One point is that all the Chinese languages (and it is a mistake to call them dialects although they are related, perhaps like all the Romance languages) are written the same. I personally knew a couple of students who could not talk to each other but could write notes. > > A more interesting question is why Japanese has not adopted an alphabetic script. They have one that is used for adding declensions (which Chinese languages lack) and a second one for foreign words and they could readily adopt it for everything. They are actually syllabaries, but close enough. And there is no spread of dialects that makes the Chinese system worth something. [See here](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12014769&postcount=19) The various Chinese dialects are in fact different languages and not mutually intelligible. They don’t “write the same”. The commonly used written form is Mandarin. Modern Chinese who don’t use Mandarin colloquially can still mostly read and write it. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/25 "2012-01-12T18:18:11Z")
> [@Throatwarbler\_Mangrove](#): > > [See here](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12014769&postcount=19) > > The various Chinese dialects are in fact different languages and not mutually intelligible. They don’t “write the same”. The commonly used written form is Mandarin. Modern Chinese who don’t use Mandarin colloquially can still mostly read and write it. Sadly, I doubt this myth will ever be debunked and relegated to the trash-heap; it savors too much of the ‘Mystery of the Orient’ which still has intrigue to separate the marks from their money. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/26 "2012-01-12T18:24:50Z")
I suppose dealing with foreign words and pronunciations would be one reason to evolve to syllabic/alphabetic/abjad. From constructs the equivalent of “eye rack” for Iraq, the short simple words start to become syllables to be used to build bigger words. I suppose one issue is that China was isolated and dominant enough in its area that it did not have to deal with a lot of imported words. Egypt, IIRC, was already evolving toward syllabic heiroglyphics, for proper names etc. Also - doesn’t Chinese have multiple words with the same pronunciation, except for inflection - making the “word-to-syllable” evolution more complicated; plus the inflection issue complicates writing by syllable, since each syllable/inflection would require a different symbol. ---
**Author:** ![Throatwarbler\_Mangrove](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8c91f0/32.png) [@Throatwarbler\_Mangrove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Throatwarbler_Mangrove)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/27 "2012-01-12T18:32:25Z")
> [@brittekland](#): > > > [@md2000](#): > > > > So was written Chinese only used by the civil service and the intellectual elite (much like written latin in medieval Europe)? Or did the easy recognition of common pictograms mean that even illiterates could recognize the basics - “Beer here” or “beware of snapping 烏龜” ? > > Common folks only knew simplest few characters and in fact, they were forbidden to learn the characters in depth often to prevent them from getting too smart for their servitude/peasant status and become learnid to defy the masters and/or cause revolution. Eventually that came in the form of communism. Common people in pre-industrial times would have had very little need to learn the characters for “beer” or “turtle” because the poor masses in those times for the most part never travelled much more than a few miles from where they were born. They know where the “beer”, “turtle” and anything else that might affect their lives are already. This is a difficult thing to comprehend for someone who lives in a modern country. I’ve met people in their 60s and 70s in rural China who had basically never left their village, ever. They were astonished and very impressed by the fact that I (as a young child) had been to the “capital” town of their local county, which would have been maybe 50-100 km away. _This was in the mid 1980s_. ---
**Author:** ![cckerberos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f0a364/32.png) [@cckerberos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cckerberos)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/28 "2012-01-12T18:36:05Z")
> [@brittekland](#): > > Each Chinese pictogram characters are like an individual drawing/painting/poetry: You can decipher deeper, different perspectives or interpretations or story to the meaning of the word if you are well knowledge person, like understanding a series of paintings put next to each other to form a word or poetry. Not from simplified abominations like those (especially the first). ---
**Author:** ![orcenio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/orcenio/32/1036_2.png) [@orcenio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/orcenio)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/29 "2012-01-12T19:14:37Z")
> [@OldGuy](#): > > From wiki: > “An abjad is a type of writing system where each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant, leaving the reader to supply the appropriate vowel.” They give as the derivation of the name, "In Arabic, “A” (ʾAlif), “B” (Bāʾ), “Ǧ” (Ǧīm), “D” (Dāl) make the word “abjad” which means “alphabet.” And of course that first letter does represent a vowel. A bit strange even though they did say usually. Most modern Abjads are “impure” IOW they now contain a few vowel characters and/or vowel diacritics. Arabic is a good example of this, as it does have a vowel (or two) in the mix and it also has optional (used only by kids) markings indicating vowels. When I wrote that we should be using a “pointed Abjad”, I was basically referring to cutting out all vowels and replacing them with diacritics. I like this more “streamlined” script better then an Alphabet. **Example minus diacritics (“pure” Abjad):** th qck brwn fx jmpd vr th lz dg. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. ---
**Author:** ![brittekland](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/aeb1de/32.png) [@brittekland](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brittekland)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/30 "2012-01-12T19:15:34Z")
> [@cckerberos](#): > > Not from simplified abominations like those (especially the first). Right. ---
**Author:** ![cckerberos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f0a364/32.png) [@cckerberos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cckerberos)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/31 "2012-01-12T19:19:44Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > A more interesting question is why Japanese has not adopted an alphabetic script. They have one that is used for adding declensions (which Chinese languages lack) and a second one for foreign words and they could readily adopt it for everything. They are actually syllabaries, but close enough. And there is no spread of dialects that makes the Chinese system worth something. There were two pushes for adopting romanization in Japan: First, in the Meiji period as Japan was rapidly modernizing and the decision was made to make written Japanese similar to contemporary spoken Japanese. Second, during the Allied Occupation following WW2. It hasn’t happened because kanji provide a number of perceived benefits. The most significant of these, IMHO, is that kanji play a vital role in allowing easy distinction to be made between the massive number of homonyms Japanese has as a result of absorbing much of its words from Chinese, a language using a far more diverse set of sounds. I have a harder time reading books written for young children (written only in one of the syllabaries) than I do standard Japanese texts and have heard similar comments from others. Others perceived benefits include being able to guess the meaning of words you don’t know, aesthetic attractiveness, tradition, etc. And on the flip side, what benefit is to be gained from abandoning kanji? Japan has a high level of literacy and I don’t think Japanese classes don’t take up more time in the Japanese curriculum than English classes do in the US. It would make things easier for some foreigners, I guess, but I don’t think that’s a major concern for the Japanese. ---
**Author:** ![cckerberos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f0a364/32.png) [@cckerberos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cckerberos)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/32 "2012-01-12T19:27:14Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > Japan is still finding its balance, back maybe 60-70 years ago almost everything was the good ol’ semantic phonetic Chinese characters, even (some) particles. Then after the reform there were very few Kanji until they started building them up again. Nowadays there’s a split between words that you always use Kanji, words where you use Kanji if you feel like it (it’s perfectly acceptable to write “under” as した or 下, and in fact my typing mechanism defaults to the former and requires explicit instruction to write the Kanji), and words that have been bastardized to katakana because it’s kewl and edgy d00d. If I remember my Japanese linguistics class correctly, the number of kanji in common usage steadily decreased until the introduction of computers when it began increasing. Now that you can use the kanji for words like 挨拶 or 薔薇 without actually having to write them yourself, it’s so much easier! (Good thing, too… since the introduction of computers have led Japanese to forget how to write even common words…) ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/33 "2012-01-12T19:43:01Z")
Most Chinese single-character words have dozens of homophones. With the exact same tones. There are hardly any Chinese characters without plenty of homophones. This is why writing Chinese in only Pinyin would be unworkable. The characters perform the essential function of disambiguating all the homophones. This is also why in modern Chinese words are so often compounds of two characters. Saying each concept as a pair of characters instead of just one helps disambiguate homophones when hearing spoken Chinese. But also sometimes to aid comprehension of spoken Chinese, they’ll draw the intended character with a fingertip in the air or on the hand. Like in English we’d hold up 2 fingers to clarify that we mean two, not to or too. Ancient Chinese didn’t have so many homophones, because there was more variety in the way sounds could be combined into words. Like in English. There was more variety of allowable consonant combinations that could come at the beginning and end of syllables, including consonant clusters. As the languages evolved over time, the rules for where sounds could occur in syllables became much more restrictive, so that consonant clusters could not exist any more, and in Mandarin only two consonant sounds are allowed at the ends of syllables: /n/ and /ŋ/. This made lots of different words collapse into homophones. The number of allowed syllables is more restrictive in Mandarin than in Cantonese, which has several more consonants available for syllable-final position. However, Pinyin is specifically designed for Mandarin and would not work for Cantonese. Edit: Writing tones in Pinyin is not an issue, because the tones are indicated with diacritics. E.g. á ā ă à. This is much more intuitive than Hmong, which writes tones with silent letters, or Zhuang which indicates them with inline numerals. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/34 "2012-01-12T19:52:58Z")
:smack: Acutally, Zhuang now writes tones with silent letters too. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/35 "2012-01-12T19:54:51Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > The Chinese written language hasn’t changed in thousands of years; if Confucius traveled in time to 2012, he would be able to read any Chinese newspaper (though the pronunciations might be difficult for him). > > As to why they didn’t change: it worked for them and they didn’t have any examples of other alphabets for thousands of years. In addition, the bureaucrats of Imperial China didn’t want to change; their job security was based, in part, on the fact that only they knew how to access their files. Everyone had their own system, and fathers would teach it to their sons so that the job would stay in the family. And English is spelled non-phonetically primarily because English pronunciation changed radically during the Middle Ages while spelling was becoming standardized. I understand that if you try to pronounce English phonetically, you can make yourself sound Medieval. We have a shot at reading Medieval documents today that we wouldn’t be able to read had our grandparents decided to change English spelling to more closely match pronunciation. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/36 "2012-01-12T19:55:54Z")
Johanna – I was going to make that argument with Japanese too, but what do you say about this conjecture? Chinese works perfectly well as a spoken language (obviously), so clearly context is more than enough to disambiguate in most cases. Sure you can ask people to clarify in spoken speech, but I somehow doubt most Chinese conversations are dominated by people getting confused and asking for clarification. ---
**Author:** ![cckerberos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f0a364/32.png) [@cckerberos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cckerberos)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/37 "2012-01-12T20:02:26Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > Johanna – I was going to make that argument with Japanese too, but what do you say about this conjecture? Chinese works perfectly well as a spoken language (obviously), so clearly context is more than enough to disambiguate in most cases. Sure you can ask people to clarify in spoken speech, but I somehow doubt most Chinese conversations are dominated by people getting confused and asking for clarification. I’ll guess that most of the homonyms are primarily used in writing rather than speech, as is the case in Japanese. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/38 "2012-01-12T20:09:56Z")
> [@brittekland](#): > > There were developments of Phoenician alphabetical languages, in great secrecy not to get caught by Chinese and the ruling classes, from the countries like Korea that inevitably travelled to China, I would assume. I can’t figure out what this means. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/39 "2012-01-12T20:25:30Z")
> [@Throatwarbler\_Mangrove](#): > > This is a difficult thing to comprehend for someone who lives in a modern country. I’ve met people in their 60s and 70s in rural China who had basically never left their village, ever. They were astonished and very impressed by the fact that I (as a young child) had been to the “capital” town of their local county, which would have been maybe 50-100 km away. _This was in the mid 1980s_. The distances involved are greater, but I know people who live in Saragossa and have spent every single vacation of their lives in Salou with shopping trips to Barcelona; their honeymoons were trips to Salou or, for the more adventurous, Barcelona (I’m talking about more than 100 people, not just one family, and I don’t even know many people from Saragossa). They never bother visit other towns and villages nearby; they’ve never been to Utebo or Sitges. As for their two towns themselves, in each of them they know the zone where they live and one or two shopping areas; forget about asking them about museums or cultural activities. This is in 2012… if those people hadn’t had cars and lived in a time in which vacations are something you can turn into a complete rut, they wouldn’t even have gone shopping downtown. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2012, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272/40 "2012-01-12T21:24:40Z")
And since nobody else has raised the nitpick, Chinese characters are not pictographs; they’re ideograms (though they probably developed from pictographs). You can’t look at a character and say “Oh, that’s a picture of a such-and-such”, though if you already know what it means you might be able to see how it developed from such a picture. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-china-adopt-an-alphabet/609272.md?page=3)